The Importance of Managing Restaurant Reviews Online

If you happen to be affiliated with a restaurant, you certainly know about websites that provide customer reviews on different restaurants. Do they matter? Well, they do and rather importantly so. Review tracks states that an astounding figure of more than 90 percent of customers shapes their opinions about restaurants based on online reviews. Hence, it is very important for a restaurant to flourish that it takes the matter of online reviews seriously.

Which websites matter?

Well, there are more than a few. But the important ones are Google, TripAdvisor, Yelp among others. 6 in every ten consumers log on to google to see reviews while TripAdvisor sees an average of 445 million unique views per month and Yelp bags a percentage of 145 million users per month. People search for restaurants and reviews come up with statistics from these websites.

How to encourage reviews?

You want more reviews, and duh, you would like the reviews to be good ones. More reviews mean more data for sites to help rate you and that’s a positive thing. First things first, how to increase the number of reviews? You can go for several options:

Check your information on these websites and ensure that everything is up to date and authentic. Submit the right photographs, contact numbers, website link, and address. Also, include a searchable menu and not a PDF file so that its items can be searched by the search bar.

Respond to reviews! This is important as you want more and more data to be pumped in the system and also this will leave a good impression of your online presence on the customers if you give a tailored reply to different reviews.

Ask the customers. That easy. Just ask the customers to give you a review while they are paying a bill or while they are leaving politely. Most people will give a review in this way.

Enable WiFi connectivity. While this is looked down by some restaurants, this does give your customers a chance to file an online review quickly and easily.

How to reply to poor reviews?

Oh, did you a get a bad review? That’s understandable. Not everything is perfect, but you must positively take these reviews and find out the reasons for such a review and try working on them to minimize such reviews. Here a few tips on how to deal professionally in such a situation:

Even if you didn’t like the fewer stars, at least acknowledge the review. Thank them for their feedback by mentioning them directly.

Focus on the positive aspects of the review. This sits well with other viewers who are reading the negative review.

Explain the situation if possible. Just focus on the facts and disregard any emotional outburst.

Give a guarantee that their discomfort will be looked upon in a serious manner and issues will try to be addressed.

If all goes well, you may also do the bold step by informing the customer nicely about the steps you have taken to ratify the situation and ask politely if the negative review can be overturned.